About
One thing I noticed with xbmc is the plugin management and organization is lacking. At the moment I think it is a manual process to add/approve plugins and there is no real central web repository. Plugins are hard to find on the web and discussion of them seems limited to random forum threads dotted all over the place. The documentation and source code is also not centralized. Lastly its hard to know if a plugin is working or broken.

Idea
Create a web based repository of all plugins containing basic information(details, icons, screenshots) as well as links to the community discussion, wiki manuals, source code links and current status.

- Please can you include plugin "version" in simplestats.xml. That will allow to properly link to the changelog and manual download.
- Extracting the screenshot from a zip file each time is fine for xbmc but very CPU intensive on a webserver. Is it possible to have them already extracted on the webserver? For now I have just linked to the zip file.

And for the future...

- I think eventually it would be best to have a unique ID for plugins instead of just a name. This would be faster to search and also prevent dupes.
- I dont think the site is very scalable, XML is sloooooooooow
- Wiki should have standard naming and structure. [done check here]
- How to to store extra plugin metadata such as paypal address and forum link, itunes like comments? Standard extra info XML maybe?

bossanova808 Wrote:Ned - You should do a nice post explaining how to make one of those pages (I what to name it etc), I for one would much prefer my add on be in there than (as you say) editing the forum post....

Well if your add-on is in offcial repo it will be made automaticly. After that you can edit it yourself. As long as you don't remove the script parts.
The wiki editing does need some explaning and also some of the widgets that are usefull while editing.